


a father's blessing

by bokutoma



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Ableist Language, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Fatherhood, Gen, Good Parent Jeralt Reus Eisner, My Unit | Byleth Has Emotions, Nonbinary My Unit | Byleth, They/Them Pronouns for My Unit | Byleth, background dimileth if you squint and stand on ur head, byleth reflecting on their dad, no on screen death, only briefly and in memory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22111717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bokutoma/pseuds/bokutoma
Summary: before meeting the love of their life for a modest proposal, byleth has a few words they'd like to say to jeralt
Relationships: Jeralt Reus Eisner & My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 12
Kudos: 30





	a father's blessing

**Author's Note:**

> this was a commission for clarkie! hope you like it <3

_Hey, I've been meaning to talk to you. Since coming to the monastery...you've changed._

* * *

The sky is bright and warm, the sun on Byleth's back as gentle as a lover might be, they think, if they had any experience with one. Even as evening begins to wither into the night, it still reaches out delicate tendrils to wrap them in a barely tangible embrace.

_Home_ , they think, and really, there's no better place for it to be.

The war is just now past; Dimitri's shoulder wound has not yet had the chance to heal over, to grow new flesh over the absence of the old. It would be a good metaphor if any of the Lions were adept at storytelling, but perhaps they'll tell Ashe. Given the chance to recover, he might spin a tale or two of his own.

Given the chance, there is so much that all of their former students might achieve. The thought of this makes them prouder than words can say.

For so long, home had been nothing but a person to Byleth, Jeralt's back a place to set their sights on. He's been dead for more than five years, bordering on six, but it's only within the past couple of months that they've found a suitable replacement for that missing feeling. (Perhaps this can be excused, though. They've only just awakened from the dead less than a year ago, after all.)

Garreg Mach had not been a place they had thought they would even be able to tolerate, rather just another obstacle to overcome. Every second spent away from the touchstone their father had been had felt like torture, even as they had begrudged him for keeping them on a leash.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course, but what was sense in the face of feeling?

Byleth flexes their hands in the grass at their fingertips, legs idly itching as the blades eat at them more pleasantly than any they'd known before. Jeralt had known or at least guessed at their ire. For all that neither had been good at feelings, their father had always managed to hazard at least a close guess as to the source of their worries, if they'd been deep enough.

If there's room enough in their heart for one final regret regarding Jeralt's death, it's that they never articulated why they'd been angry in the first place, and they had never apologized for not understanding him. There had always been secrets haunting the family footsteps, after all.

Still, they think they might be forgiven anyway.

* * *

Their hair is getting long. This is not the proper response to what their current partner has just said, of course, but it's easier to focus on the tickle of hair along their chin and shoulders than it is to deal with the idle tides of emotion that threaten to crash past the shoreline.

"Did you not hear me, Demon?" their fellow mercenary snarls, voice blatantly mocking in yet another way they can't quite understand. "Or are you deaf as well as dumb? That would explain why you don't care about the screams of those you damn. Perhaps you might be trained to something resembling human after all."

Maybe Jeralt will cut it for them, or braid it the way he had when they were younger. Anything to stop thinking about this, about howls that might press in if they dropped their guard. What was the point of doing something if not to do it well, to be the best, never mind the haunting specters that visit them at night?

They can't help how they react to the sight of blood - the reaction that has never been there to begin with.

"Are you going to say anything?" the other mercenary presses, and Byleth takes only the vaguest comfort from knowing that if they were really half the Ashen Demon that the title made them out to be, he would be dead already. It's a blessing and a curse that he isn't, that they're not.

"Please be quiet," they say, and it's kind of curious, how they manage to be polite when Jeralt is anything but. Where they learned manners from might be another topic of consideration for the next time they tune out of existence - it _will_ happen again. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Scripts don't fool me, Demon. What does the Blade Breaker keep around for but steel and a tamed and talented pet? Makes you wonder what hellspawn's cunt you clawed your way out of, what good old Jeralt must have done to be stuck with such a fucked up kid."

_Tears_ , they beg silently, but not even their face manages to change, frozen into stiffness as it is by a force they cannot name, one they've never been able to control.

When the flat of their sword lays flush against the mercenary's shoulder, edge pressed against the junction that leads to his neck, they don't feel better, but it's something close. It won't improve their reputation when he flees to his friends, but it's the only way they know how to protect themselves.

And when he's gone, the sting of his words and Byleth's own unsheathed blade the only evidence he had even been there to begin with, they sink to the ground and feel their lips twist unfamiliarly into a scowl. If anyone in these nondescript Leicester woods hears a howl that sounds like neither creature nor man, then they will know better than to creep any closer than they must.

There are too many mysteries that surround them, too many missing gaps and silent dreams, and they rage in a way they have never known how to do before this moment. What had Jeralt thought, bringing them into this world only to leave them with no semblance of what normalcy was like?

Achingly, they realize they have never had a choice in any of these matters.

Maybe it's not rational to be angry, not when there's so much that's still a mystery. There are no rules for how to behave in a situation like this - they've never seen the inside of the same town for more than a week at a time - and even if there were, Byleth is certain they wouldn't know them. No matter what gossips whisper into the unforgiving rumor mill, they do _feel_. Highs and lows are not foreign to them, just as a blade is not wholly unfamiliar to a novice.

This, however, is something completely and totally different.

How do you deal with emotions that twist in your guts like the broken shaft of an arrow? They don't know what choices Jeralt has had to face; maybe this poison would have bled out of them long ago had either known the words to speak about these sorts of things. All they know is that they've been devoid of choice, of any options other than kill or be killed. What might it be like to have grown up stationary?

They've heard of childhood sweethearts, of community and lifelong friends. For the first time (the first time they can articulate), they feel the loss of these things more keenly than they ever had before.

If the next month sees them ice Jeralt out one ignored attempt at conversations at a time, then it's thanks to the otherwise perfect solidity of their bond that he does not rise to meet this bait.

* * *

The first memory Byleth recalls with any clarity is many years ago, back when they were still smaller than Jeralt's biggest blade (the one he wouldn't admit was only for show, when he'd prefer to skate by on minimal bloodshed and the Blade Breaker reputations). They had been far too young to be an asset on the battlefield, but that hadn't stopped their father from sparring with them, sticks as their weapons of choice.

(Now, Byleth knows how rare it is to have had a mercenary father that kept them around, rather than leaving them behind or abandoning them altogether.)

Jeralt would win every time; even had he ever made the decision to let them win, they would have known he'd taken it easy on them, having spent enough time following in the footsteps of his carnage. He'd done his best to protect them from that reality, but the tongues of myrmidons had always been noticeably loose, and there had been plenty of cases of accidental witness.

If Byleth's expressionless face on these occasions had erased any doubts as to the normalcy of his child, Jeralt had said nothing about it.

It had always been for reasons like this that they'd loved him.

To others, fatherly affection might have come in different ways (the heavy hand of a nobleman on his heir's shoulder, mingled laughter as a farmer and his child separate chaff from grain), but to Byleth, it had come in the form of quiet acceptance and an easy smile, a clap on the back after a hard day's work. Jeralt didn't understand them, never had (and now never would), but when it had come down to it, he hadn't needed to.

When asked how he could have raised a child to be this cold, Jeralt had always laughed like the question had been a joke whose punchline everyone had been privy to. When the nights had been dark enough for the faintest flicker of _something_ to break through, he'd neither rejoiced in the brief regularity nor comforted his only child; instead, he had been a steady rock, a buoy in the endless sea of nothing (nothing where _something_ ought to be).

Really, that had been all they had wanted.

And yes, they still remember the anger, pointless and mortifying though it now feels. The unfinished conversation, the explanation left unsaid before that _bitch_ Kronya sunk her accursed blade into him, still eats at them like rotting fruit left for the flies. They'd never gotten the opportunity to apologize, to whisper into the vast chasm that had laid between them that it had never really been him they'd been angry with, only their own shortcomings.

Somehow, the chasm must have been smaller than they'd always thought, because their final moments had been a benediction, indirect though it might have been. For all their directness, the two of them had failed to bring that trait to their emotions, but if Byleth parts the hazy veil of memory, loss, and pain, they know that he'd always understood.

Perhaps returning proof of their mutual faith had been their final gift to him.

* * *

_"Hey, I've been meaning to talk to you. Since coming to the monastery...you've changed."_

_"Changed?"_

_"You've been angry since we first arrived in Remire Village. And you look so happy when you're instructing the brats. Before the monastery, I'd never seen you bear your emotions like that. Not once."_

_"You might be right."_

_"Then perhaps it's a good thing we came to the monastery, if only so I could see your face lit up like that. Or maybe there was never any reason for us to leave the monastery in the first place..."_

_"Wasn't I born after you left the monastery?"_

_"Ah...I've put my foot in my mouth, haven't I? Though I suppose it may be nearly that time...Come to my office when you next have a moment. There's something I need to tell you."_

* * *

Here in the present, clouds bright white and grass crushed beneath the palms of their hands, with the sunset-red sky and the kiss of a dying star to seal the benediction, Byleth can finally let go of the plague of six years, banish it like worms back to the soil, ready to feed into something new and greater.

"You would like him," they say, twisting the ring that sits all too heavy on their finger. "The kingdom rises and falls on his smile, perhaps literally. I think you would appreciate the balancing act we make of each other."

If they were more prone to idle daydreaming or earnest prayer, they might have imagined Jeralt's response, here in the shared grave of their past.

It doesn't matter. Byleth knows that he would be happy for them anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> hit me up on twitter @kingblaiddyd for commission options, fic support, and general shenanigans


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